While at GCTS, we attended a lunchbag debate between Lints and Davis on the role of women in the Church. We also attended a special presentation on one side of it by Kathy Keller. We also talked a lot with a lot of people about it. My lovely bride took a class on Women in Mission which strongly argued one particular side of the argument. Kaiser argued for one particular side in his OT Ethics class and then Ciampa argued the same side in OT in the NT. But, never did I really make it a point to look at the argument myself. I know what the above folks would say, but I never dug in and said, “Who do I think has it right on this.”

Similarly, I became a believer and pretty immediately got involved at Fellowship Bible Church in Conway, AR. Our church, like most of the Fellowship Bible churches in the South found most of our pastors from Dallas Theological which is firmly on a particular side on this issue…the same side as the campus ministry I was involved with. Though I grew up UMC, a denomination on the other side of the lines. But, never did I really make it a point to look at the argument myself. I know what the above folks would say, but I never dug in and said, “Who do I think has it right on this.”

In all this time, what I did learn is that people on both sides are passionate about this issue, and that people regularly are hurt, more precisely heartbroken, by the words of those from the other camp. One thing that I knew, and was grateful to God for, at the beginning of looking into this issue was that wherever I landed, I was ready to walk in compassion towards those who differ in opinion. I’ve seen good friends weep over this stuff, so I know to tread lightly.

But, I also know that I can’t avoid the issue just because it would be most comfortable. I think for the last few years, I’ve just acted and spoken like those that I was in the discussion with…egalitarian around my egalitarian friends and complimentarian around my complementarian friends. I was a gender debate chameleon, or a women’s roles Pat. The unsuspecting onlooker would have been quite confused. I was that shirt in your closet that in certain light looks black, but in different light looks navy.

But, I want to decide which, if either, side has it right, and seeing as how there is no time like the present, I started reading a ton of articles from different sides while I watched my son playing outside in the sandbox, and I slowly compiled a list of questions that, if they are answered, you can decide which camp you are in. This might seem odd, but the two sides seemed to me to be dancing around certain key questions and subquestions that if one can discern how they would answer those questions, then that would tell them if they are Egalitarian or Complementarian. I came up with 4 key or primary questions:

Are men and women created equally?

Are men and women created differently?

Are different roles in the family included in the differences between men and women?

Are those roles also in place within the Church?

Obviously to answer these questions, you often need some subquestions that when they are answered, they help you answer these larger (what I call) primary questions. I won’t list these subquestions here, but will include them in upcoming posts. Some of these subquestions are ones that seem most important to one side of the debate while others are important to the other side, but if you don’t deal honestly with each of them, then you’ve made a one sided decision, haven’t you.

So, in my next post, I’ll start with the first question. I really do hope that as you have input along the way, that you’d share that with me. I’m really excited with the process that I’ve gone through and where I have landed on the issue. It’s been an enriching experience already, and I’m glad to invite you guys to be a part of this process in my life.

In Detroit, Some See Grounds for Church Planting

DETROIT — Crime, unemployment and the housing crisis have chased thousands of people out of this city. But those are the very reasons Eric Russ moved in.

Mr. Russ is “lead visionary pastor” and one of the founders of the Mack Avenue Community Church, named for a long thoroughfare that cuts across the east side of Detroit. He and his congregation at “Mack Ave.” represent a small, young corps of church organizers trying to spark a revival — both spiritual and economic — in this battered city.

Photos: Detroit’s Spiritual Revival

Stephen McGee for The Wall Street JournalThe Revs. Eric Neilson, Leon Stevenson and Eric Russ of Mack Avenue Community Church shared a laugh before the service.

“We wanted to go where people were forgetting God loved them,” says Mr. Russ, 33 years old, who left an affluent church in suburban Cincinnati to move to Detroit two years ago, around the time the city’s gradual decline spiraled into a full-blown crisis.

In the past decade, a movement often referred to as “urban church planting” has gained steam in evangelical circles. The aim: to build vibrant congregations and revitalize neighborhoods in frayed communities.

Detroit has long had a heavy concentration of churches for a city its size, and many of them assist the community by doing everything from donating bicycles to opening fast-food restaurants to create jobs. The area also is home to synagogues and mosques, some of which have begun offering assistance such as health-care clinics to members and nonmembers alike. Yet the economic downturn has strained the resources of many religious organizations.

Mack Ave. is among a handful of evangelical churches that have set up shop in Detroit and nearby communities. Their founders typically are transplants like Mr. Russ who say they feel called to help Detroit pull itself back from the brink. With financial support donated largely from churches outside Detroit, a few are beginning to thrive, in some cases creating pockets of rejuvenation in an otherwise decaying urban landscape.

Their success echoes efforts by evangelical churches in places such as Atlanta and Chicago, where new congregations have reinvigorated blighted areas.

But a city like Detroit poses unique problems for church planters. There are festering racial tensions that date back decades, a beleaguered urban infrastructure and, now, a regional economy on its knees.

Scott Thomas is director of Acts 29 Network, which helps found evangelical churches nationwide. He estimates that new churches generally take three to five years to establish themselves, but given the lack of resources in Detroit, “it would probably take seven years” for a new church to survive without funding from donors outside the city, he says.

Citadel of Faith opened its doors six years ago in a former synagogue in an ailing area near Boston Edison, a quaint historic neighborhood north of downtown. Founder Harvey Carey, a Chicago native, says he has lured a dozen families, both black and white, to move to near Citadel from outside the city. He says his church has helped close a handful of local drug houses by holding ad hoc services on their lawns until the dealers could no longer operate.

“I didn’t know anything about Detroit,” says Mr. Carey, 43. He spent 14 years as an assistant pastor at Salem Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side before moving here in 2003. “I had no connections here,” he says of Detroit. “It was literally a spiritual directive.”

Evangelical church Mack Ave. opened its doors on Easter Sunday in Indian Village, an upscale neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Its congregation of some 70 people is racially diverse.

Mr. Russ and his pastoral team count on a wide network of financial supporters — churches from Ohio to Massachusetts to Nova Scotia as well as his old Cincinnati congregation — to help cover the $600 monthly rent plus salaries for three pastors.

Still, young evangelicals who have moved to Detroit to join and help develop nascent congregations say the city can be a big adjustment. Last year, Jason McLean, 23, came to Detroit to join the Mack Ave. congregation from suburban Wayne, Mich., where he had lost several jobs and felt directionless, he says. He now lives in a church-owned house with three other young Mack Ave. members. He and his housemates, all in their 20s, prefer to have dinner parties at home than go out in Detroit at night, where they don’t always feel safe, Mr. McLean says. “The lack of a police presence has been tough to see,” he says.

Detroit wasn’t founder Mr. Russ’s first choice. The son of two drug addicts, he attended seminary in Massachusetts and spent time as a missionary in Uganda. After that, he took a job near Cincinnati and had planned to settle down there with a comfortable suburban congregation.

That changed after he and a small group of seminary classmates and other friends visited Detroit over Christmas three years ago. Local church leaders suggested Mr. Russ and his group focus on a particular neighborhood where they saw an acute need, and an opportunity.

While Mack Ave. was established in a historically affluent enclave, dilapidated neighborhoods that never recovered from 1967 riots surround the wealthy core. Just around the corner from the church are liquor stores, gas stations and empty storefronts.

Before the church opened its doors, Mr. Russ and his congregation spent a year and a half working in the community, focused on addressing basic needs. They offered backpacks of school supplies to children and sold toiletries and fresh fruit at street corners for pennies on the dollar. And before they had their own building, they began knocking on doors in search of parishioners.

Once he arrived in Detroit, Mr. Russ joined the neighborhood association in Indian Village and became a block marshal. He has purchased two homes in the area, rehabilitating one with the help of another church before selling it to a member of his congregation for little more than he bought it for.

More than a dozen families affiliated with Mack Ave., most from other states, ultimately purchased homes in the area and made improvements to them, hoping to demonstrate their intention to stay in Detroit.

But they are never far from the realities of Detroit. Mr. Russ once had his car stolen, only to recover it himself in a confrontation with thieves. Another Mack Ave. pastor, Leon Stevenson, and his wife were robbed at gunpoint in front of their home last fall.

Mack Ave.’s founders say they sense a lingering skepticism toward outsiders — particularly whites — who settle in the city. Indeed, a few of the founding members of the church ultimately left, deeming the divide too wide.

Tony Stec, 29, who attended seminary with Mr. Russ and worked as administrator of Mack Ave., left after less than a year. Mr. Stec, who is white, had racial epithets directed at him on the street, and says he ultimately felt unwelcome and unsafe. After deciding he didn’t feel comfortable relocating his wife here, he took a job at a church outside Des Moines, Iowa, instead. “I wouldn’t necessarily discourage anyone” from going to Detroit,” says Mr. Stec. “But I would certainly preface it with the realization that it’s going to be difficult.”

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For years, I’ve really liked the verse John 17:4 which reads: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.” This is taken from the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus. I thought the timing of this statement was a bit odd (pre-crucifixion and pre-resurrection), but what really made me stand in awe was simply thinking about the peace that come from knowing what it is that God has given me to accomplish, and simply working on that instead of the millions of other good ideas that fight for my time.

Recently, this idea has come again and again. Just a few weeks ago, I posted about my desire to learn as much as I can in order to be more and more useful to the Lord. And, while I am still pursuing that great goal, I also realize that I’m not called to be a master of all things. I don’t know if I can point out each and everything that God has given me to accomplish in this life, but I can begin now to identify things that ARE NOT mine. The place that I most realize some of these things is on Google Reader. I love to read a wide array of blogs, but it’s really gotten out of hand. I find so many topics interesting even if I will never have any use for that information. For instance, I have been reading a good bit regarding the emerging/emergent church. But, will I ever meet an emergent church advocate in the Muslim world? Probably not. Do I need to be an expert on the EM to accomplish the work in the Muslim World that God has given me? Not at all. Granted, there is some overlap b/w the EM and some erroneous missiologies being practiced on the field, but why read EM stuff which seems to be focused in places with a high ratio of coffee shops to humans in the Urban Centers of the U.S. and much less in the Majority World (2/3 World, 3rd World, etc). I sort of rabbit trailed there for a minute. Another topic that I’m NOT called to be an expert in, no matter how facinating I find it is Pauline studies. But, I see these blogs dissecting the minutest details regarding the New Perspective or Campbell’s new book about Romans, etc. and my first thought is, “I need that book and I need to read all the reviews in the stratosphere about it.” But, that’s not my calling. I know others, very gifted men and women, who have that calling, but I don’t. Why don’t I email or call one of them and say, “Give me the skinny on this issue” if I ever really have need to dig into it for some strange reason. Or I can ask for a book recommendation about a topic that I need to know more about whenver that need actually arises instead of constantly trying to keep up with a million and one issues all the time, much to the neglect of my actual calling.

Does this make sense? I challenge myself on this thought sometimes, asking if I’m being lazy, or concocting scenarios where knowing all of this might be useful, but I’m certain that focusing on one’s calling should require more time that the other 1,000,001 things, and that most likely God is going to judge me according to how I’ve handled His calling. Sure, I could read almost any book about the faith and find something enriching in it, and I can tell myself it’s worth reading a 500 page book just for the possibility of that small random enrichment or I can be honest and say that I need greater intellectual discipline. I need to think more deeply about much fewer topics. I’m a mile wide and an inch deep.

I want to continue to grow in knowledge, even in breadth, and I’m doing that through my reading of the Western Classics, but I’m trying to give up my addiction to expertise. Truth is with my calling, I couldn’t be an expert in any of those other things anyway…and they are just limbs that need lopping off.

Finally, it is with joy that I anticipate much more time with my family, greater depth of reading in my own field of calling, and fewer less-than-well-informed arguments about other fields in which I am not an expert, since I knew enough to be dangerous, but too little to be useful. Lord, keep this vision of focusing on the things that YOU have for me before my eyes all the time. Take away the hubris within me that demands that I know something about everything. And cause me to give my time to those things that I know without a doubt that you have given me – Family and Ministry to Muslims.

I started reading John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy not long after our move in August. I was excited to start a nice spy thriller which could be a good escape from language study. Chapter after chapter, the feeling began to take shape. What feeling is that? The feeling that says, “I shouldn’t read any more of this book.” Unbeknownst to me, this particular book is very short on espionage and quite heavy on the inner workings of the main character, mainly centering around the depravity of his childhood in general, and his father in particular. In the wake of his life are men and women (mother figures and lovers) on whom he has spent his every energy trying to please, manipulate, use, or be used by. Perhaps if I had read to the end, I would have found some redemption in the life of this “perfect spy.” But, I knew long before the place that I stopped, that even a redemptive ending couldn’t redeem all of the garbage that I was intaking.

Similarly, we just started watching a sitcom that has premiered this season in the US. We are watching it on our computer. The first couple of episodes started off innocently enough…lots of laughs, quirky characters, etc. At that point, I could overlook the hints of irreligion and secular hedonism, but either those hints have fully developed into more advanced expressions of ungodliness or I’m growing more sensitive to those little hints because with each passing episode, I enjoy less and want more and more to not watch any more. I think I’m ready to stop watching, though perhaps I should have already. Even little things like High Schoolers scratching for popularity (a thing that is very real and in any sitcom involving young people and something that I’ve never had any sensitivity towards) has begun making my stomach turn.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m happy about this, or proud of myself. To be honest, I’m a little sad about it. One part of me would love to have finished the book and wants to continue watching the show. A big part of me would like to not sense conviction about trivial things. I can say that while I have chosen to not finish the book and will not continue to watch the show, I want to, or maybe it’s more accurate to say, “I want to not NOT want to!” It’s a sinking feeling of Christian conviction. Someday, I will most likely appreciate God’s work in this way. I’ll realize that He’s saving me from things that I personally (and maybe only me) am susceptible to or affected by.

And more than wanting to not Not watch and read, I want to obey. There is joy and freedom there. I don’t always appreciate it. It’s kind of like some friends from college who wanted to do certain things that I (and probably they) thought was not good to do, but they argued from Christian freedom and argued against being “too holy” which often translates into “weird” or holier than thou. Looking at my own heart and looking back at their weak (at best) arguments, what we really are saying is that we want to persist in our sin without conviction and yet also experience the benefits of salvation, forgetting that being cleansed from the ugliness of that very sin is one of the greatest benefits of that salvation to which we cling.